Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 22, 2012 @06:12PM
from the i-just-be-he-cann dept.

darthcamaro writes "ICANN has officially hired a new CEO to replace the Rob Beckstom. ICANN industry unknown Fadi Chehade is taking the top job — but there is a catch. He can't start for another 90 days, even though ICANN has been looking for a new CEO for months. Even better is Chehade's salary. ICANN will pay him $800,000 a year. Is the CEO of ICANN one of the highest paying jobs in the Internet governance landscape?"

Do you know how to run it? Seriously, everyone here has an opinion but do you have the expertise to run it? In a way that would make everyone happy and that would be net neutral and that would satisfy politics? In the real world? In a way that would allow Nepal to bitch and China to still express an opinion and have both the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Premier ready to come visit you at your house for drinks and a round of golf with you and Bill Murray?

My thoughts exactly. I run a company that affects approx. 1/10000000 of the people. I get paid about 1/8 of his salary. This is not an unreasonable amount of pay (for either of us), and I actually think he is underpaid.

I wouldn't hire someone who is an expert DBA, expert front-end and back-end developer, expert IT in every operating system ever made, and a professional athlete, too. I don't expect such a person exists, so putting a price-tag of $5,000,000/yr on that position is ridiculous. If the job entails a lot of work in different fields such that it's difficult to find a single person capable of doing every task, you split it up. It's the same reason you don't encapsulate tens of thousands of lines of unrelated co

Do you know how to run it? Seriously, everyone here has an opinion but do you have the expertise to run it? In a way that would make everyone happy and that would be net neutral and that would satisfy politics? In the real world? In a way that would allow Nepal to bitch and China to still express an opinion and have both the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Premier ready to come visit you at your house for drinks and a round of golf with you and Bill Murray?

Hell, yes I'd do it better. It wouldn't be hard to. Currently, the TLD thing shows how corrupt the system is. And I really don't understand why you are talking about WenJiaBao, or the Dalai Lama in the same sentence when we are talking about ICANN: you must have smoked weed or something. But when we're at it: that's the problem, politics should not be involved in something that should stay neutral.

Bitch about $800k all you want, but at $400k I think we get a $400k run internet. Pay for performance is a world-wide metric. Do I want someone to do it for free? No, because that is what I will get in return.

At the beginning of the Internet, it wasn't run by a company, and it was working well. The way ICANN runs thing

It's simply too much money for the job, smart people do great jobs for considerably less. What they are going to get for that kind of money is a MBA drone who talks in buzzwords, has no imagination, and only cares about acquiring as much personal wealth as possible.

People that get paid more just get more greedy and more not less susceptible to bribery and other types of corruption. You can't pay someone enough to change their human nature.

Please stop perpetuating lies. It's an old wives tale that has absolutely no scientific backing. Evidence shows the opposite: high compensation has a detrimental effect on productivity of creative white collar employees. (This does not apply to manual labor workers)

Unfortunately, $700k doesn't buy that much fiber. Besides, that's the job of the carriers, whether they've been doing it well or not. Personally, I'd rather see that money go towards startups which exemplify the values of an open Internet, run by passionate individuals who want to drive growth. They would make more positive change than this guy and work at least an order of magnitude harder to make it happen.

First of all the CEO is never in the office. Second, ICANN has been around for a decade and has burned though ten of millions of dollars. Show me the deliverables. If any other government agency acted like this there'd be charges.

Keep in mind Beckstrom succeeded a guy that lied to congress about how much money he made (it's on youtube!) and was quickly sent home back to Australia.

After a certain point, higher salaries actually tend to be indicative of a greater likelihood of bribeability. Someone who is interested in the work first, and money only as a means to an end, is relatively unbribeable. Someone who is only willing to do the work if the price is right is willing to do anything if the price is right. And there's always someone who can offer more than the salary, no matter how high you set it.

Woman at the bar to man next to her, "$100? I wouldn't sleep with you for $200!""Okay," says the man. "How about $300? We already know you're a whore, now we can haggle price."

Please do note nothing on talent or skill is addressed.

I dunno, but ICANN seems to have been screwing up by the numbers of late. I realize non-profits can be a great dodge for the upper crust, but $800k to facilitate extortion for silly domains? And competence is still not addressed.

Except I'd tell the UN, with their grabby little paws, to get stuffed so probably I don't qualify. Oh, and the offices are moving from LA to Bermuda or Grand Cayman.

Oh, and I outsource registration for the new TLD's to existing registrars with good track records, so people don't need to use ICA clients to virtual machines with dubious availability to fill out forms.

OK, one more: I reduce the ICANN fees by 75%, but only after there's enough money to build a 50' monument to Jon

Yeah, I mean, he has to run the business unit, ensure that sales and marketing are doing their jobs and that products are delivered to stores. Oh wait, HE AIN'T running a business at ALL!

People keep trying to rationalize these salaries as if there is some CEO shortage. Really it all about the good ole boy network and I will pad your salary and you pad mine. I remember after the banking crash in 2008 and they had someone reviewing salaries at banks. Every banking officer claimed that they were above average and deserved a raise!

I tell you what, lets set some goals for this guy as a CEO and if it meets them then he can have his huge salary. Otherwise this is just a welfare check to the overpaid.

I'm curious: how much do you think that someone who runs the internet should be paid?

Keep in mind that many parts of it are now the commercial/communication/entertainment hub to the world.

Do you think it should be less than priceline.com ($50M), Qualcomm ($36M), Viacom ($31M), Time Warner ($20M), and eBay ($15M). Presumably, he has the skillset to do most of these jobs. Microsoft clocks in at $1.4M, so he is making roughly half of that...

Greed knows no limit. Somebody demanding an $800k per year salary could easily be bribed for a few million if they are prone to being bribed. What's really silly is just how little people can be bribed for, people who could afford the things they are being bribed with.

The CEO of NPR makes $450K/year. The CEO of Unicef makes $473K/year. The CEO of the American Red Cross makes $1M/year. The CEO of the Boys & Girls Club makes $1M. This list could go on.

The list just shows that CEOs are overpaid. Nothing new there. A CEO just needs to be a competent manager, and there are plenty of them around.

Despite the Dilbert mentality techies like to have about managers, I've known several good managers who were smart people and good at what they did. I've known some bad ones, too, but the same could be said about my tech colleagues.

The problem is that the management competence is not enough to be a CEO. You must have a close relationship with big players in finance that will set the goal of the amount of money there expect to extract from your business. The CEO salary, from there point of view, is just a small return on the massive profit there expect to get.

So if you don't have a plan to be very profitable, you will not be selected as CEO. If you ever get selected, this is because you promise massive profit and naturally expect a big

If you're hiring someone you feel you need to make 'immune to luring away (or bribing)' you're hiring someone you already know is bribable and who you know would leave you for a larger salary. That rather sounds like a mistake.

Frankly I'd wager it's more a case of paying him enough that he'll pay you or your friends more when he's a member on the board of the company in which you're applying for the CEO position.

Most high paying corporate jobs have less to do with skills than with membership in the boys clu

I'm curious: how much do you think that someone who runs the internet should be paid?

2.718 times the average industrial wage.

I believe that's somewhere in the region of $135,000, but I don't have exact figures for the median US wage. The multiplier is obvious.

Do you think it should be less than priceline.com ($50M), Qualcomm ($36M), Viacom ($31M), Time Warner ($20M), and eBay ($15M).

Yes. Moreover, I think that such salaries should not be permitted in publicly listed, limited liability companies.

Presumably, he has the skillset to do most of these jobs.

A screaming money casting its dung around the office probably has the skillset to run run them as well, since running them into the ground appears to be the only thing modern CEOs actually do in return for their compensation. That and engage in crime, but I digress.

I find that I am comfortable with this number.

Then doubtless you will be comfortable with the corresponding increase in your tax bill required to pay for it and the multitude of linked salaries. Moreover, you will of course be perfectly contented in seeing your own wages decrease in value of in real terms to support the increasingly bloated and unearned salaries of the class you so admire. Enjoy your banana republic.

"I'm curious: how much do you think that someone who runs the internet should be paid?"

Nothing. No one should run the internet. But if I HAD to pick someone? It wouldn't be someone making 800k; it would be RMS or someone from the EFF, who, I suspect, would happily do so for free or nearly so.

Dude, he doesn't "run the internet". His job, apparently, is nothing more than finding new ways of polluting the gTLD namespace. If he didn't turn up for work for the next three months, the internet would not suddenly collapse.

This. Oh my god, this. ICANN "runs" absolutely nothing. They have no bearing on anything the carriers do. If you want to see who does run the Internet, just look at who is driving the most users and most traffic. I assure you, it's not ICANN.

"I'm curious: how much do you think that someone who runs the internet should be paid?"

He doesn't run the Internet. He heads up the company that for a decade has blocked the development of new top level domains for the trademark lobby/mpaa/riaa. This could have all been finished in 1998/1999.

Notice the Internet ran fine - and grew - before ICANN? And that since the there have been very few innovations and development. Just the way the intellectual property lobby wants it.

$800,000 isn't even all that much, when you're talking about executive pay. That's probably less than 10 times what an engineer at ICANN would make. In contrast, the average CEO made 380 times [cnn.com] what the average worker made in 2011.

Apparently, you're right if you count only the salary, in which case a CEO makes roughly 90 times the worker salary. If you include all income, it is close to 500 times the worker salary. Sorry, but I don't see how this can be justified in terms of productivity or management skills or whatever.

In 1970, CEO salary and bonus packages were typically about $700,000 - 25 times the average production worker salary; by 2000, CEO salaries had jumped to almost $2.2 million on average, 90 times the average salary of a worker, according to a 2004 study on CEO pay by Kevin J. Murphy and Jan Zabojnik. Toss in stock options and other benefits, and the salary of a CEO is nearly 500 times the average worker salary, the study says.

Your quote suggests that in 1970 average production worker salary was $28,000 and that seems awful high for 1970 wages, while your year 2000 number suggests average worker salary of only about $24,000, which is below average pay. See how your statistics have been manipulated already? Regardless, I find it hard to believe that those numbers aren't hugely affected by those 300 of the largest public corporations. It's like stating that the average global income is $7,000 while a full third of the world makes a

$800,000 isn't even all that much, when you're talking about executive pay.

We're talking about an honorific position here, of someone who should be listening to the world. We aren't talking about the CEO of a big corp/bank making billions. Oh and when we're at it: even bankers shouldn't get that much. Let's put it this way: for ANY position, this is too much money, yet even more in the case of ICANN, where it should be a charge rather than a gift.

The thing I've seen over the years is that the good CEOs make a big difference for their companies. With the effects of their decisions being as important as they are they can swing billions of dollars one way or another.

The bad ones can ruin a company, or at least drive it into the gutter.

The problem is that both the good and bad get extremely high pay, and only the good ones are worth it.

Sadly, the "qualification" is not the ability to competently run something, but rather, the membership in the special club which may or may not correlate with actual competence. For instance, Carly Fiorina....

Do you really believe, that in a nation of 300M people, that we couldn't find people willing and capable to do almost any administrative job for far less than 800k in total remuneration?

The "hire a great CEO" problem is very similar to the "hire a great programmer" problem.

The real deal in both roles commands a huge salary, and is totally worth it. The trouble is, if your company doesn't already have one, it has no expertise to judge if the person they want to hire is worth the money.

The second-rate software company that hires a $500/hour consultant is no different from the big firm that hires a $5000/hour CEO. They have little ability to judge skills, and so tend to get suckered by a smooth, well-groomed candidate.

The firms with the expertise in place (e.g. Google for technical hires, Goldman Sachs for management hires) do not make this mistake, and shell out big bucks for the people who are actually worth it.

We aren't talking about a company which goal would be to make money. We're talking about the Internet governance. You should be comparing such a position with a job at the UN rather than at a big corp. You're being fooled by the word CEO here.

John Postel used to do the same job of ICANN CEO and an entire swathe of their senior management for free. That was only 20 years ago.

While the net may have increased in scale since then, its complexity has not, and its has not grown to the point where someone needs to be paid $800,000 a year plus bonuses etc just to keep it all ticking over.

As for the "competition" at the CEO level; while there is indeed a worldwide race to the very bowels of vapidity, fecklessness, and incompetence in this field, again, the cream of this crop are not worth paying $800,000 a year for.

I'm sorry, but GM's CEO is not 34 times more talented or more qualified than Toyota's CEO. I say we outsource all our CEO positions to Japan.

If someone can run ICANN they can run a lot of other stuff too.

Yes, they can probably run Fannie Mae.

It must be really difficult to run a government-granted monopoly as if it were your own private domain. With an almost unlimited budget, it must be really difficult to hire consultants who are going to do all the work for you.

Considering the rules of the UN, that's mostly the only thing they CAN do. The security council would nearly every other thing the general assembly tried to do. It's hard to find a project that none of the permanent members are against.

To to be honest, I always thought that it would be a good idea if you could have a carname.gm or carname.ford or item.microsoft, or routername.cisco, siri.apple instead of.com. It just makes sense outside of a tech circle. Doesn't it make sense when you think about it? Governments should have a country.gov though, and same for countries. Yeah it might seem like a pain in the ass, and it is. But for the average person it's simple, it makes sense.

1. Come up with useless retarded ways to extort money from businesses and/or people.
2. Hire a CEO and funnel the money into his pockets to draw attention from the ridiculous salaries people who don't even come into work make.

SOP for businesses these days. It's about time we cut the legs out from under ICANN, and maybe even remove the head, too. ICANN has such an insignificantly infinitesimal role in Internet management, they could be shut-down today and

ICANN doesn't do shit these days (it can be argued they hardly ever did). All the current ICANN does is find more crappy ideas to make money off of. By chance did they hire the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert?

The ineptitude of the bosses of ICANN can come across as entertaining - until of course you realize that the idiots making the unbelievably stupid and short-sighted decisions are supposed to be "experts".

Some people here seems to agree that 800 kUSD is a reasonable income. The problem is that excessivve income are hamrful to real economy. The sums required to pay such a salary are taken from real economy and are too big to return to it as good consumption or real economy investements. A lot of this money will end up in financial economy, feeding bubbles and preparing the next burst.

Moreover, who can claim his work cannot be done by someone else for less than 800 kUSD? Such an income is not necessary to ge

Excessive CEO salaries are primarily harmful to the companies that pay them; the "real economy" reacts by buying cheaper products (say, from China).

These salaries only become harmful if they are coupled with government-granted monopolies that destroy market mechanisms, as they do for example for ICANN (goverment license to fiddle with the Internet), and Apple/Microsoft (patents).

I don't know his renumeration, but between pension, shares and the rest, he's gotta be coming close to this number.

There was a number of.com packages going around, and in all honesty to the larger companies 800k isn't a lot of money (Level Crossing, I'm looking at you). You negotiate the right deals at the right level and look after the company you work for and all of a sudden you've paid for your pay cheque a couple of times over.

You're missing the point. You're right that for a given sized bribe, the larger your salary the easier it is to hide it. But you can't give someone earning $800k the same bribe you'd offer someone making $80K -- you'll need a bribe probably 10 times bigger to make it worthwhile. And the bigger bribe will be harder to hide on a company's accounting books, harder to convert into cash, physically bulkier and harder to conceal, and difficult to spend without attracting attention.